Farm News 01-29-06
Sunday morning, after chores
Drusilla Lays an Egg
All three of the Golden Sebright bantam hens are named Drusilla. They don't mind all having the same name; it makes their gossiping amusing. They will all sit on a high perch, talking about the other poultry, interrupting each other so that no sentence is ever finished. “Did you see – Drusilla, her behavior was – Yes, Drusilla, I – Not that goose, Drusilla, she's too -- .”
The bantams consider themselves members of the upper class, far above the other poultry. For one thing, they have the highest roost, the one above the barn door, and they thus have the opportunity to crap on everyone else. They don't do it out of nastiness, like Ting, but out of disdain. They don't think other creatures are of a high enough order to dislike being crapped upon.
All three Drusillas seem to be laying eggs. Unless I spend a lot of time watching them I can't know. They share nests this early in the season, so there might be five nests with eggs in them and the eggs will be an assortment laid by all three Drusillas.
Drusilla likes to read while sitting on her nest, waiting for her daily egg to appear. She is not, though, constructed in such a manner that she can hold a book, so she expects me to sit in the barn and read to her while she is on the nest. After I had read several Harry Potter books to her she actually met Harry, who was disguised as a mouse at that time, so now Drusilla has become quite interested in magic. This spring she asked me to read Johnathon Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. It is a 780 page book, so we might be at it for a while.
The reader will, I pray, understand that, although I refer to Drusilla in the singular, there are indeed three chickens with that name. Although there are three, they are, to most people, indistinguishable, although they will assert that they are distinguished if not distinguishable. The use of the singular is much easier for the author, the reader, and Drusilla, who cannot count to three without making several errors.
Drusilla isn't very smart; in fact, she's just a dumb chicken, not much smarter than Ting. The book is interesting, so I'm reading some of it to myself in the evening, with the result that Drusilla gets short pieces with long parts skipped. Drusilla doesn't care or even notice, and I am going through the book quickly.
Ting's New Trick
In any discussion of dumb chickens Ting is bound to appear. As I have mentioned many times, Ting lives to attack my ankles. This week she came up with a new trick. There is a door between the front and back parts of the barn. Ting has started hiding behind the door so that she can attack me as I come through. The door, though, swings to the side that Ting is hiding behind, so that it whacks her in the head and, sometimes, tumbles her over. Such treatment infuriates Ting, so that she is now spending a great part of her day hiding there, ready to attack. Each time I open the door Ting takes a knock on the head, increasing her fury. Dumb chicken.
Pruning Time
Few things prune time from your day like pruning trees. I keep trying to cast myself in the role of wise old orchard keeper, patiently caring for his trees, but, for me, orchard keeper is a very attractive role to view and a hard one to play. January and February are the best months for pruning fruit trees, generally, and deciding what to cut is usually fairly easy.
Most fruit trees are prone to growing what are called 'water sprouts' or 'bull whips'. These are long, rapidly growing vertical shoots that generally grow off a much larger branch. They all need to be cut off a quarter inch or so above the connection to the branch. Do that and half your pruning is finished. If you find any branches rubbing against each other or close to it, cut them out. There, pruning is finished.
It sounds easy but it takes a while. For the terminally lazy it is a major hassle.
How Do You Pronounce “@#$%^&*!”?
The phrase spelled, “@#$%^&*!”, has many different pronunciations, all of which I would like to use. Tuesday afternoon, while eating a late lunch, I heard a loud CRAAACK as I bit down on a sandwich. It was good old #5, the bicuspid molar on the top right side adjacent to the eye tooth. Last month an endodontist did a root canal on #5. See Rooting in the Canal, Farm News 12-25-05.
The loud noise occurred when one of the roots broke. Left dangling by one root, the molar wobbled around in its socket and started hurting. So I called the dentist I normally see. He was on vacation until the first of February. Then I called the endodontist who had done the root canal and was able to schedule an appointment for Wednesday evening.
The endodontist peered into my mouth and poked around for a while until he found just the spot to press that sent fire shooting through my head. Holding his finger there, firmly, he explained that the root was broken and that it would require surgery, probably, to remove the broken piece. He doesn't do surgery, only root canals, and I needed to see an oral surgeon.
Thursday morning I called the oral surgeon, only to be told that he was on vacation until the first of February. Using the Yellow Pages, a great way to find dentists, I found another oral surgeon and called. A nice young woman answered, listened to my plight, and asked me if the first of February would be okay.
@#$%^&*! By this time it was very clear to me that there was a broad conspiracy among dentists to keep me in pain until the first of February. Using my most pitiful voice, I begged, pleaded, wept into the phone, and generally made myself obnoxious, until the young lady said I could come in at 11:00 that day. Hah! The conspiracy was broken.
Finally, I was in a dentist's chair, knowing it was going to be a long and unpleasant experience, waiting for the great man to come in and remove my broken tooth. He arrived, looked into my mouth, made a few cheerful comments, picked up a pair of pliers, and plucked out the tooth and its broken root with one deft twist of the wrist. No pain, no anguish, no screaming patients, just a five minute procedure.
@#$%^&*! I thought this would make a great story, and he ruined the whole thing. Well, I am not going to allow some jolly dentist with his big smile and skilful dexterity with pliers ruin an opportunity for a story, so I reflected on the experience for a while. Then it came to me: FORMS. When I went in that office I was in pain, tired, and irritable, so the first thing they did was give me a big stack of forms to fill out. A stack of paper like that could feed a billy goat for a week.
The plethora of forms in health care facilities is not due to excessive government regulation, it's due to the archaic management methods in place in most health care facilities. Docs generally think if they are smart enough to be docs then they are smart enough to manage the practice. That belief proves they aren't as smart as they think they are.
Every one of those forms had a place for me to print my name and enter the date. One form even asked for me to print my name three times. Those forms will then be transcribed by a clerk, with an opportunity for a typing error on every field. A kiosk computer could be used for patients to enter their data, and it should know the date itself, removing dozens of chances for errors. Then, if paper forms are needed, they can be printed out with all the identifier information already in place.
The dentist wanted to know what medications I was taking. I wasn't about to print out all that from memory. But the dentist's system couldn't ask the physician's system for the data. No, it required a telephone call from a clerk in the dentist's office to a clerk in the physician's office. The physician's clerk then had to search for the paper records, pull out the medications list, take to a fax machine, and fax it across the street to the dentist's office. All that nonsense probably required at least $20 worth of human resources, $20 that went on everyone's health care costs.
The President has decreed that docs must all go to digital med records. He failed to tell the Institute of Medicine to get its act together and to create a set of data definitions that all digital medical record systems will use. So, a whole lot of old mainframe people are now in the medical records system business, each company producing proprietary systems that can't interact with other systems. Archaic proprietary record keeping can kill modern health care just by pushing costs over the top.
Drusilla Lays an Egg
All three of the Golden Sebright bantam hens are named Drusilla. They don't mind all having the same name; it makes their gossiping amusing. They will all sit on a high perch, talking about the other poultry, interrupting each other so that no sentence is ever finished. “Did you see – Drusilla, her behavior was – Yes, Drusilla, I – Not that goose, Drusilla, she's too -- .”
The bantams consider themselves members of the upper class, far above the other poultry. For one thing, they have the highest roost, the one above the barn door, and they thus have the opportunity to crap on everyone else. They don't do it out of nastiness, like Ting, but out of disdain. They don't think other creatures are of a high enough order to dislike being crapped upon.
All three Drusillas seem to be laying eggs. Unless I spend a lot of time watching them I can't know. They share nests this early in the season, so there might be five nests with eggs in them and the eggs will be an assortment laid by all three Drusillas.
Drusilla likes to read while sitting on her nest, waiting for her daily egg to appear. She is not, though, constructed in such a manner that she can hold a book, so she expects me to sit in the barn and read to her while she is on the nest. After I had read several Harry Potter books to her she actually met Harry, who was disguised as a mouse at that time, so now Drusilla has become quite interested in magic. This spring she asked me to read Johnathon Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. It is a 780 page book, so we might be at it for a while.
The reader will, I pray, understand that, although I refer to Drusilla in the singular, there are indeed three chickens with that name. Although there are three, they are, to most people, indistinguishable, although they will assert that they are distinguished if not distinguishable. The use of the singular is much easier for the author, the reader, and Drusilla, who cannot count to three without making several errors.
Drusilla isn't very smart; in fact, she's just a dumb chicken, not much smarter than Ting. The book is interesting, so I'm reading some of it to myself in the evening, with the result that Drusilla gets short pieces with long parts skipped. Drusilla doesn't care or even notice, and I am going through the book quickly.
Ting's New Trick
In any discussion of dumb chickens Ting is bound to appear. As I have mentioned many times, Ting lives to attack my ankles. This week she came up with a new trick. There is a door between the front and back parts of the barn. Ting has started hiding behind the door so that she can attack me as I come through. The door, though, swings to the side that Ting is hiding behind, so that it whacks her in the head and, sometimes, tumbles her over. Such treatment infuriates Ting, so that she is now spending a great part of her day hiding there, ready to attack. Each time I open the door Ting takes a knock on the head, increasing her fury. Dumb chicken.
Pruning Time
Few things prune time from your day like pruning trees. I keep trying to cast myself in the role of wise old orchard keeper, patiently caring for his trees, but, for me, orchard keeper is a very attractive role to view and a hard one to play. January and February are the best months for pruning fruit trees, generally, and deciding what to cut is usually fairly easy.
Most fruit trees are prone to growing what are called 'water sprouts' or 'bull whips'. These are long, rapidly growing vertical shoots that generally grow off a much larger branch. They all need to be cut off a quarter inch or so above the connection to the branch. Do that and half your pruning is finished. If you find any branches rubbing against each other or close to it, cut them out. There, pruning is finished.
It sounds easy but it takes a while. For the terminally lazy it is a major hassle.
How Do You Pronounce “@#$%^&*!”?
The phrase spelled, “@#$%^&*!”, has many different pronunciations, all of which I would like to use. Tuesday afternoon, while eating a late lunch, I heard a loud CRAAACK as I bit down on a sandwich. It was good old #5, the bicuspid molar on the top right side adjacent to the eye tooth. Last month an endodontist did a root canal on #5. See Rooting in the Canal, Farm News 12-25-05.
The loud noise occurred when one of the roots broke. Left dangling by one root, the molar wobbled around in its socket and started hurting. So I called the dentist I normally see. He was on vacation until the first of February. Then I called the endodontist who had done the root canal and was able to schedule an appointment for Wednesday evening.
The endodontist peered into my mouth and poked around for a while until he found just the spot to press that sent fire shooting through my head. Holding his finger there, firmly, he explained that the root was broken and that it would require surgery, probably, to remove the broken piece. He doesn't do surgery, only root canals, and I needed to see an oral surgeon.
Thursday morning I called the oral surgeon, only to be told that he was on vacation until the first of February. Using the Yellow Pages, a great way to find dentists, I found another oral surgeon and called. A nice young woman answered, listened to my plight, and asked me if the first of February would be okay.
@#$%^&*! By this time it was very clear to me that there was a broad conspiracy among dentists to keep me in pain until the first of February. Using my most pitiful voice, I begged, pleaded, wept into the phone, and generally made myself obnoxious, until the young lady said I could come in at 11:00 that day. Hah! The conspiracy was broken.
Finally, I was in a dentist's chair, knowing it was going to be a long and unpleasant experience, waiting for the great man to come in and remove my broken tooth. He arrived, looked into my mouth, made a few cheerful comments, picked up a pair of pliers, and plucked out the tooth and its broken root with one deft twist of the wrist. No pain, no anguish, no screaming patients, just a five minute procedure.
@#$%^&*! I thought this would make a great story, and he ruined the whole thing. Well, I am not going to allow some jolly dentist with his big smile and skilful dexterity with pliers ruin an opportunity for a story, so I reflected on the experience for a while. Then it came to me: FORMS. When I went in that office I was in pain, tired, and irritable, so the first thing they did was give me a big stack of forms to fill out. A stack of paper like that could feed a billy goat for a week.
The plethora of forms in health care facilities is not due to excessive government regulation, it's due to the archaic management methods in place in most health care facilities. Docs generally think if they are smart enough to be docs then they are smart enough to manage the practice. That belief proves they aren't as smart as they think they are.
Every one of those forms had a place for me to print my name and enter the date. One form even asked for me to print my name three times. Those forms will then be transcribed by a clerk, with an opportunity for a typing error on every field. A kiosk computer could be used for patients to enter their data, and it should know the date itself, removing dozens of chances for errors. Then, if paper forms are needed, they can be printed out with all the identifier information already in place.
The dentist wanted to know what medications I was taking. I wasn't about to print out all that from memory. But the dentist's system couldn't ask the physician's system for the data. No, it required a telephone call from a clerk in the dentist's office to a clerk in the physician's office. The physician's clerk then had to search for the paper records, pull out the medications list, take to a fax machine, and fax it across the street to the dentist's office. All that nonsense probably required at least $20 worth of human resources, $20 that went on everyone's health care costs.
The President has decreed that docs must all go to digital med records. He failed to tell the Institute of Medicine to get its act together and to create a set of data definitions that all digital medical record systems will use. So, a whole lot of old mainframe people are now in the medical records system business, each company producing proprietary systems that can't interact with other systems. Archaic proprietary record keeping can kill modern health care just by pushing costs over the top.
posted by The Geezer at 8:36 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home